Popularity Contest

When I was going through fertility treatment and desperately needed my mother's emotional support, she refused to talk to me. When I told my mother that I had succeeded that they had another grandchild on the way, she worried what others would think if they found out.

That tune has changed in the last week, Lord knows why. In the world of Junior High School (at the age of 63), my being pregnant as a single parent has made my mother the most popular girl in the synagogue. She calls me every day and starts with the sentence, "This is who I told today, I told them all about you, and this is what they said..."

I keep telling my mother that I don't care if I have the approval of people from the outside world who barely know me. I keep telling my mother that I will only let her around my child if she does not show negativity and judgement. And yet, she persists, insisting that this is her way of showing how happy she is for me, in her oddly constructed fantasy world.

The Rabbi of their synagogue - the same man who sanctioned putting my brain-dead grandfather into a further coma, for the sake of halacha, a man who knows little to nothing about modern medical procedures - was happy for me. Wow, that made my day.

My intolerant and judgemental relatives on my father's side, ultra-religious men and women who have not spoken to me in over twenty years, or invited me to any family events on their side, because I was not religious enough for them; parents who married off their children at the age of 17; they assured my mother that my having a child will not prevent me from getting married. Like I hadn't said that to my mother several times in the last month.

My mother also told absolute strangers, like the mother of my sister-in-law's Rabbi in Washington DC, and expected me to be overjoyed that random strangers across the globe have my best interests in mind. My mother is continually surprised that people have been "nice" and "lovely."

The most important stamp of approval yet has been the local synagogue yenta, a woman to whom my mother was afraid to talk, given the speed at which the news would travel once "Mrs. V" knew about it, the chain of gossip that would mortify my mother within her community. Mrs. V wants me to use the same Douala her daughter in Jerusalem used, and has volunteered to be my long-distance breastfeeding coach. She herself had all of her children on the floor of their living room, with an audience, and believes in breast feeding well into the late toddler years.

G-d bless my mother for embracing this pregnancy, but oh how I wish she would learn after all these years that unless you love and accept yourself, until you can take full responsibility for your choices and their consequences, all the external validation in the world is not worth a damn.